Many thanks to infectedpimple for starting this very valuable discussion, and to all the participants.

One of the themes here is the absence of a GUI instrument editor. A couple of the roadblocks have already been mentioned. One is that the developer of such a program would be shooting at a moving target. Another is that the open source and free software development communities are not as vibrant in the computer music field as they are in other aspects of computing.

The world needs an SFZ sampler, ideally with a simple wave editor for trimming samples, setting loop points, and normalizing; a graphical representation for manipulating key ranges and velocity layers; some means for keeping track of articulation groups; and (as someone wisely suggested earlier in this thread) profiles for several target SFZ players. In its absence I have been trying to figure out what to do, with little success.

One approach is to use an existing editor like Kontakt, Halion, LinuxSampler or whatever and rely on one of the existing translation programs to move instrument definitions to and from SFZ files. The list includes Chicken Systems Translator, CdXtract, Extreme Sample Converter and Awave Studio. Which leads to my noobie question for all you seasoned veterans:

Which combination of instrument format (.nki, .gig., etc.) and conversion software provides the most complete (strike "most complete" and replace it with "least incomplete") translation back and forth?

Another approach I am considering is an editor that stores its instruments in text format, so that a converter can be written and maintained by somebody with my archaic and rusty programming skills. TX16Wx is a great tool in its own right, and it writes its instruments in XML. I haven't started trying to map back and forth between its opcodes and SFZ opcodes, so I don't know what the problems are. There may well be other candidates.

Comments and suggestions are welcome. Thank you.

Last edited by rrichard63 on Sun Jun 08, 2014 8:39 am, edited 2 times in total.

What plays if I hit note 100? Where is that defined? Well, the defaults for lokey and hikey are 0 and 127 but there's no such thing as a global setting for sample, hence we have to see if there's anything at a lower level overriding it. The <global> gives us transpose=-12 but no sample. The first <group> gives us a sample and a loop_mode. Neither of the two contained <region>s applies and nor does the second <group>, so we've got all the information we can get. So we play sine.wav with transpose=-12 and defaults for all other known parameters.

What plays if I hit note 32? Well we get through as far as <group> just the same and the first <region> does not apply quite clearly. The second <region> has a key range this falls into, so it applies. Here two previously-set values get overridden in the child leaf node: loop_mode (from <group>) and transpose (from <global>) to give the set of parameters used.

But also, the second <group> now matches. Depending on the velocity, we'll also play 1.wav or 2.wav (from whichever <region> matches) with loop_mode continuous (from the second <group>) and transpose=-12 (from <global>).

Last edited by pljones on Sun Jun 08, 2014 9:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

rrichard63 wrote:One of the themes here is the absence of a GUI instrument editor.

There is SFZEd by Steve Holt (see the attached picture). Also, one can use Scripting (e.g., Microsoft Visual Basic) to write information to a TXT file (which gets saved as an SFZ file) based on "filename formatting" parameters of WAV files and this method requires no GUI.

rrichard63 wrote:The world needs an SFZ sampler

Plenty of Samplers already import SFZ (e.g., Camel Audio Alchemy, Image-Line DirectWave). As you mentioned, there's no shortage of Sample Converting programs either to convert to other formats (e.g., SF2).

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I have this program. I find it harder to use than instrument editors with wave editors for trimming and setting loop points, and GUI representations of keymaps, velocity layers, etc.

Hmm, well what I do is separate WAV editing from SFZ Patch making. SFZEd gives a "virtual keyboard" interface which works as long as you have sfz.dll for "Auditioning".

rrichard63 wrote:As I asked above: Which combination of instrument format (.nki, .gig., etc.) and conversion software provides the most complete (strike "most complete" and replace it with "least incomplete") translation back and forth?